Heh! That’s not a nice topic to blog about Mister. Yes, you’re right on that, but it is a topical one. There is an accusation that some cheating has gone on in the PGETC. An observer from one team, who was using Leela to analyze all the games, noticed that one guy in the other team was always playing Leela’s move. It is one of the inevitable things about having really good software that you can easily use for live game analysis, and indeed for live cheating.

Take the new Lizzie program, still in 0.x development stage but very powerful given that you can live sync to LeelaZero.

Then you can just as well use classic Leela 11

Or indeed hook up any other AI to Sabaki, GoGUI, or whatever.

In short, if you fancy cheating, you’ve got everything going for you.

In Chess a guy called Ken Regan came up with a powerful detection model. It’s not a very easy task to prove that somebody cheated. You have to show (obviously) that somebody is playing at a different level to what they normally would. You cannot simply say that so-and-so played 5 moves in a row like Zen. Ken specifically warns us against the belief that a move that is given a clear standout evaluation by a program is much more likely to be found by a strong human player – SEE HERE . Where he talks about how certain forced games can have as their characteristic a higher level of AI choices.

Using the GoR calculator on the EGD website, I did find that the player in question had an increase of about 50 points (half a rank) if it were a level A event – which is half a stone. Looking a bit further, I found that if I moved his rating up to 2600 (+ 2 ranks), I got roughly that his performance was as it was expected to be. That might look like a good piece of evidence. Well actually it alone doesn’t prove anything other than that he played well on the internet for that PGETC season.

In his defense you have to note two things:

The player is clearly improving in over the board play.

They openly admit to studying with Leela (Classic). Not just studying with, extensively studying with for 2 years, with witnesses to back them up.

Whilst we wait for the statistical analysis to play out, I repeat what I’ve said earlier on here. If you want to spend time studying Go with a computer, then there’s never been a better time to do it.

Bears are supposed to be grouchy creatures. Scientists put that down to all that honey giving them a diabetic profile, but the lack of wifi in the woods is probably equally frustrating. Pandas are supposed to be grumpier than your normal brown bear, and after being disconnected from IGS 10 times in the space of a couple of hours, I really feel for them. The problems of these creatures are just not fully appreciated. Let’s stop with the Alexei Sayle influenced monologue for a moment though – what I’m trying to say is that the PGETC has, and probably always will, managed to annoy me in some way. Out of pride, pleasure, or ambition – whichever – I want to play for Ireland. Yet there I am in an arena that is about as attractive as the smell at the back of Paris Go Club. Disconnections, lag, people not turning up on time, people not turning up, a client from hell, glued to the screen for 3 hours to eat up everything else you could have done with your evening – it’s a combination of frustrations for me. There isn’t even a reward for a podium place in the minor divisions, you’re just an afterthought, as are the moves played perhaps. Anyway, Ireland’s campaign kicked off again last night with a draw to Kazakhstan and I am sitting on the bench watching, because I just don’t have time to go back in there. Maybe I’m better off that way. The scoreline suggests so. 2-2. A draw is not a loss.

For years now KGS has been suffering from a dripping death in popularity. New players generally prefer OGS because it is easy to set up and use. KGS lost players with each new update of Java because they couldn’t work out how to connect to the server any longer. The top echelon of players departed to new servers. Even Go Federations started to switch over to using OGS – look at France, Sweden, UK, hey – even Ireland. Now though, it looks like it will finally have an HTML client. I don’t remember when wms started working on one, or when I realised that he would never finish one. New clients are coming. GoUniverse or ShinKGS are 2 decent examples right now. Can it bring the players back – perhaps not, but it will at least even out the share of beginners who choose between KGS/OGS to learn to play on.

As if a birthday wasn’t enough to remind you that you are getting older, the arrival of the new year serves to shout the fact loudly at you through a hangover. Time then to celebrate that there is little to do today, and to pretend to wisely invest my time in recording what I am likely to be doing over the next year. Naturally we leave out unrelated nonsense like developing a taste in contemporary Irish history, or trying to speak French without sounding like a complete cretin. No, here I reveal, almost exclusively, what I intend to do over the next year in regards to that game we love to call Go.

For a bit of fun I started an exposition on a different kind of ;San Ren Sei

Tiebreakers are not as unimportant as some people might wish them to be. Unless you’re using something like GoDraw, your pairing will be influenced by the tiebreakers which have been chosen by the tournament director. In other words, it is not just at the close of the event that the tiebreakers come into play. The EGF has a page which describes its current policy on tiebreakers - http://eurogofed.org/egf/toursysrules.htm - these date from 2007. This page is not as clear as it might be, and at times is offering some bad advice, but it is relatively useful all the same.

In a recent competition the following criteria were used

Swiss Score, Direct Comparison, SOS-2 – SOS-1, and SOS.

This is an unusual choice, but we can see where it came from. On the EGF’s page we have

If only one tiebreaker is used, then these tiebreakers are recommended:

Number of Board Wins.

Direct Comparison.

SOS-2.

SOS-1.

SOS.

Rating.

Previous Order.

Lottery.

What the organiser missed is

Recommended Order of Equal Players or Tiebreakers

This general order of priority is recommended:

Playing more rounds.

Playing playoff rounds, possibly with short thinking times.

Having equal players.

Using tiebreakers.

If only one tiebreaker is used, then the recommended order of priority is given by the list of tiebreakers that may be used.

Only one of SOS-2, SOS-1, or SOS may be used.

If more than one tiebreaker is used in a relative order of priority, then this is given by the relative order in the list of tiebreakers that may be used.

What he might have been further mislead by

Recommended Usage of Tiebreakers

Number of Board Wins: It can be applied only in a team tournament. There it is highly meaningful and should be the first tiebreaker.

Direct Comparison: Provided it can be applied at all, it is very meaningful because it might be interpreted as an already performed knockout playoff among the tied players. So, for the final results, generally it should be the first or even the only tiebreaker.

SOS-2, SOS-1, SOS: They should be used only in McMahon or Swiss. They express a mixture of opponents’ strength, statistical noise, and pairing luck. Their apparent numerical precision is greater than their true significance. Therefore they must be used with care. Application for the final results is doubtful while application for making pairings is reasonable. SOS-2 filters more noise than SOS-1 than SOS; more noise can be filtered in more rounds more easily.

Direct Comparison is a total devil if we try to use it to break ties between more than 1 player, in which case it is not at all a play-off game but an imagination which has run wild. SOS is much better suited to Swiss and McMahon pairings as it is considering the actual tournament performance, and not just extrapolating from 1 game.

An advice he was not given is that Direct Comparison should not be used in pairings, it should only be used at the end of the event in tiebreaking. It should never be used in making the pairings. It was then all rather unfortunate that this system was chosen. We have to consider why it was chosen.

It was chosen because the TD studied the 2007 page and tried to apply it.

It was chosen because the EGF does not validate or rubber stamp championship tournament systems

It was chosen because nobody was brusque enough, or competent enough, to dispute it

About a month ago I rediscovered John Terry’s blog about go and the promotion of go. It contains quite a lot of interesting articles, even if it is slightly infected with a grudge against the American Go Association‘s leadership or officialdom, and indeed the use of the word Go as opposed to go. A week ago he wrote an interesting piece about John Power and his legacy in the promotion of the game.

Go Review is dead. Go World is dead. What is left?

To my mind, only go is left. And that is what I promote.

I wish that more people would understand this. Promotion requires an active interest in the sporting aspects of a game.

John Terry doesn’t strike me as an expert on promotion, his video idea was a bit of a dead duck, but he makes some interesting points in his blog. How many opportunities get squandered because we think communication and promotion means sending an email? How can we adapt to a world were the printed medium is commercially inviable – there are no subscriptions we can make to english language publications about Go now. What is the key starting point to getting people interested? Can we be stand offish and hope to entice people with the resources we have, or do we have to decamp to the schools to catch (indoctrinate) them while they’re young? They are big questions; questions which don’t interest most players since they prefer playing instead.

Recently I volunteered as a sort of proofreader for the EGF‘s news feed. As I understand it, the article authors fight over whether to write Go or go. The material is more relevant and vibrant than any of that which has sat on its site for many a year – yet it still remains stand offish. There is no official advert saying « Contributors wanted from Turkey, Ukraine, UK… » – instead you have something of an authorship clique. Viktor Lin is seemingly intent on publishing sporting material – i.e. articles about the games themselves – which should be great. I wonder though, how many people actually read and appreciate what they have on the website? Is it going to be enough to draw interest and sponsors in the new era of the EGF? Time will tell. For now I feel that the new culture is still missing something in terms of inclusivity.

The EGD has a Calculator to find rating(GoR) change after any tournament. At the moment, there are at least 2 variations of the rating system with regards to tournament results submission. This means that you can have a different exit rating depending on the country you play in. To show this, we will look at an improving player with an out of date rank – of course he could also be a total sandbagger. His last rank was 10-kyu so he enters at this rank, but actually he is 2-kyu online (about 1800?). Thus he smashes up his opposition – that is he wins 5 games out of 5.

Scenario 1 is the straight up normal mode of operation.

Round

Opponent

P.Change

O.Change

1

1000

+35.6

-34.4

2

1100

+46.5

-42.1

3

1225

+57.3

-47.1

4

1350

+63.9

-47.6

5

1500

+67.9

-44.8

Thus our player (P) moves his rating from 1000 to 1271.2. Notice that opponent 5 loses less GoR than opponent 4. At first sight this seems illogical, but there is an explanation. This is because opponent 5 is in a higher rating bracket, thus his modifier is lower. The total loss in rating for the opponents is 216.

Scenario 2 is where either the Tournament Director, the EGF Member (e.g. Finland’s or France’s Go Association), or the EGD administrators themselves look at the results, decide that (P) needs his rating changed, and do it. Let us pretend his rating is changed to 1300 by one of these three entities before they enter the results into the database. That is, they alter the tournament data before submission.

Round

Opponent

P.Change

O.Change

1

1000

+7.4

-8.3

2

1100

+11.9

-13.0

3

1225

+20.9

-21.4

4

1350

+32.8

-30.8

5

1500

+44.8

-37.5

Thus our player (P) moves his rating from 1300 (or perhaps 1000) to 1417.8. The total loss in rating for the opponents is 111.

Here I do not say which system is better. I only want to say that after all these years we should have only one system, i.e. one complete end to end method of working, in the European Go Federation. One system which we all accept and agree to use. If we do not, then the ratings between one country and the next might not be the same. That is inherently a bad thing for rating integrity.

Rather a depressing idea isn’t it? Reading an article such as Rational Play in the AGA EJournal leaves me wondering why they need to see a computer program in this light. Is it really so bad to have waved goodbye to some of the outdated ideas of the Edo period at the expense of home-taping killing the Music industry? (And by the way EMI, up yours something Rotten.) No. These days having longer than 15 minutes to spare for a game of Go is a rare occurrance. One way to continue playing is to choose an opponent who doesn’t mind if you escape. I have found that Leela is just such an opponent. Not being quite up to the standard of AlphaGo, and currently retailing for freem it lends itself to being rather a reasonable opponent for myself. So far, whilst sipping a coffee of a day in work, I have progressed up to the mediocre level of 2-kyu. That’s means I have managed to beat Leela when it gave me 7 stones. Not such a hard thing to do I suppose, but I am in no rush for the stressful levels that await me higher up the scale. After a while I might even get in some decent practice against it.

The reason I started this blog was to record the history of Irish Go. However here we have something a little different, a brief diversion to Romania in 1989. In other words, I have begun a translation of the work of Radu Baciu’s work Go In Competition. I suppose that this is a manual which would normally be left by the wayside as having little to no significant value in terms of instruction. Nevertheless it is historically a very important piece in the development of Go in Romania, and I at least find it quite an interesting piece of work in terms of thinking about the game. You can find the initial Version 1 here at https://github.com/Lecale/GoInCompetition. It contains 7 contemporary games, an introduction and a glossary.

Whilst on holiday with my family I learnt of the sad death of Bernard Palmer. To most people in Ireland he was probably better known as a Chess player. These days you can look through his game history with websites like 365chess.com or whatever, to get a feel of the length and breadth of his career, but that gives you little indication of what type of man he really was. At the Chess board, or even just debating about Chess Politics, he could exhibit a fell temper sometimes backed up by even worse threats. One can suppose that this relatively bad behaviour originated out of the very character of the game itself, for when playing Go, nothing of the sort could be seen. Most people remarked that he was a completely different and affable character. I’m sure that those who have played Go in Ireland prior to 2008 will remember his larger than life figure, many might also remember Bernard for his role as a guide around the bars of Dublin. My first meeting with Bernard was inside the half light of the Pembroke Inn, when I noticed a large man drinking what was probably Carlsberg lager at the bar. Over the years to come I remember seeing him playing Go there, and not seeing him playing Go there, several more times in the same circumstances. He seemed to have something of a natural gift for the game, for without displaying most of the skills normally associated with the calculating chess player, his positional instinct was powerful. Bernard was the challenger in the 1992 / 3 final against Noel Mitchell – you can see one of his games here. I believe it illustrates the fact that Bernard simply wasn’t up to the same level as Noel in the technical details associated with close quarter fighting. It also illustrates the perhaps forgotten fact that Bernard was one of the early powerhouses of Irish Go. He never progressed significantly beyond his level of 3-kyu he attained in 1992, which at the time made him one of the strongest players in the country, and the strongest player at Collegians. He was persistent though, playing in many further Top 8 competitions, and he ended up travelling to Japan twice to represent Ireland – once for the International Amateur Pair Go Championship, and once for the World Amateur Go Championship. The latter he was interviewed for by Peter Mioch. He was actually just 57 years old when he died, and with his passing we lose something of the history of Collegians Chess and Go Club.